Peter Lav Gallery celebrates the New Year with the exhibition Die Verweigerung der Realität im Namen der Realität (Denial of Reality in the Name of Reality) by the German artist Edgar Leciejewski.

Edgar Leciejewski’s (b. 1977) work is inspired by the social and scientific uses of photography. It represents an experimental and analytical attempt to tease out meaning from the medium, paradoxically often by removing information from the individual works. In the three portraits Ronny, Helga and Cristina (2013/2014) Leciejewski has sanded away the faces with abrasive paper. By thus removing the single most identifying element from the portraits he puts into question the informational aspect of the photographic medium. In the presentation of the works he attempts to reinvest the images with identity and endow them with a non-photographic authenticity by covering each frame with clothes worn by the person portrayed.

In Snout II, 2013 Leciewski quotes a work by English photography pioneer W.H.F. Talbot’s book Pencil of Nature, presenting an abundance of objects and books from Art and Cultural history placed in the constructed reality of a bookshelf, constructed because it is digitally assembled from several images. Among the objects are several iconic works from the history of photography, a weevil and a multi-volume encyclopedia intermingled with more personal images and objects. But some image-areas are digitally pixelated or blurred and the information contained within thereby remains hidden or at least unreadable.

Leciejewski’s point of departure is often his personal experience of perceiving the world and through his work he examines this perception of reality and especially how photography creates a membrane between man and reality. He is particularly drawn to the way in which photography contains and mediates information. Leciejewski has said that as an artist he uses photography as a means to escape into reality. His works can be understood as anthropological field notes from this excursion into reality; meditations on the transformation from physical appearance into information which is inextricably linked with photography as a documentary medium.

Edgar Leciejewski studied at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. He has exhibited widely both in Germany and abroad and his work is included in private in public collections such as Sammlung F.C. Gundlach, Hamburg; UBS Art Collection, Zürich and Zabludowicz Collection, London. Leciejewski has published several books including Himmel ohne Wolken (Berlin, 2011), and Ghosts and Flowers / How to Build a Sun (Leipzig, 2011). Edgar Leciejewski lives and works in Leipzig.